Troll (1986)

1986
Directed by John Carl Buechler
Starring Noah Hathaway, Michael Moriarty, Shelley Hac, Jenny Beck, Sonny Bono (yes, really), Phil Fondacaro, Julia Louis-Dreyfuss (yes, really!) and June Lockhart (yes, really!!)

Now we're getting into the meat of the Empire Pictures filmography.  The video store success of Ghoulies really must have been like some sort of satellite beckoning the low-budget movie gods, and low and behold studio started giving Charles Band that most holiest of holy things: greenlights.  A whole lot of 'em.  The movie in question today was released in January of 1986, and this was a year in which they would seemingly churn out a new movie seemingly every month.  Empire was the Hammer Studios of the '80s - they were a factory, and Troll was tailor-made for their assembly line.

First things first: I saw this movie way back in the late '90s when we actually used to have a semi-decent video store in my hometown during a summer in which I rented a ton of old horror movies.  I remember not really liking it then.  On this watch, I actually found it to be semi-enjoyable.  Maybe not in the way that I want to immediately watch it again, but the movie's goofy charm and glorious HD presentation did a lot for me this time around.  That, and I've now seen a bunch of Full Moon films.  Troll is prototype Charles Band.  It's "blink and you miss it" short at 85 minutes, it's chock-full of goofy characters, and it's got some really flashy effects for the time period.  If you're looking for a decent time that exactly require your full attention while watching, look no further.  It's also got some cast of actors.  More on that in a bit.

The thing that everyone should know about pretty much everything connected to Empire Pictures and Charles Band: these movies have unapologetically basic plots.  I've said this before about many other films, but it goes doubly true for these guys.  They take something like two minutes to set up and get going, and Troll is no different.  By the time you're half-done settling in to watch this thing, we've met the main family.  Stereotypical Mom, Dad, teenage son and little girl daughter.  Most fascinating is the fact that the dad and the son are both named Harry Potter.  Yes, really (got it in again!).  Considering that I chose to watch Lord of the Rings instead of that film series, I've definitely gotta hand it to this movie when it comes to my favorite iteration of this character's name.  Also amazing is that the son is played by Noah "Atreyu" Hathaway, a couple years removed from The Neverending Story and now fully in teen idol mode.  The character that he plays is a big magic and Star Trek fan, so -1 points for realism in terms of cool kids there.  The mom is played by Shelley Hack, who kind of looks like a budget version of Catherine Hicks here minus some of the sex appeal.

After that fascinating little introductory scene that manages to introduce all of those fascinating character traits, we meet the Troll when little girl daughter (named Wendy, and also kind of a budget version of Kristie Klark) goes into the laundry facility of their new apartment complex.  This movie was directed by John Carl Buechler, a well-known horror movie effects guru, and you can tell that this guy was his creation from fur-covered head to...um, fur-covered feet.  The thing was impressive for its time, especially in how expressive the face was.  But here, he's after taking over the entire freakin' world, and it starts with little Wendy as he uses his magic ring to possess her spirit.  Yes, really (#5!).  It escalates from here as the movie almost self-destructs with just HOW stupid the main family is here with Wendy, watching her wander all around, disappear for hours, act like a completely different person and still say things like "I think Wendy isn't quite herself lately."  Nobody ever said horror movie characters were smart, but this is really more a fantasy flick, so that's slightly less of an excuse.

And now for the requisite "plot unspooling" paragraph, complete with bonus commentary on all of the side characters contained within.  See, the Troll is really an ancient wizard who, for some convoluted reason, must transform the apartment complex by taking possession of all of the residents with his ring in order to conquer the world.  This is completed when said apartemnt turns into a green, lush fairy world.  But it's the residents of said apartments where this movie is really something else.  Sonny Bono is in this movie, introduced in pretty much one scene so that he can die, but boy is he unforgettable.  He's kind of a Hugh Hefner-esque playboy dude who takes pride in macking it to the ladies, and it's glorious.  We've also got Julia-Louis Dreyfuss as a sort of nondescript hot girl who gets transformed into a goddamned NYMPH (complete with a nearly-nude Dreyfuss running around in the simulated forest).  There's Phil Fondacaro, the guy who would later show up as Sir Nigel Penneyweight in Ghoulies II, and his story arc is actually kind of emotional.  And then there's everyone's favorite TV mom June Lockhart as a mysterious old woman who turns out to be a righteous witch overseeing the apartment complex as the guardian of good in the universe keeping the troll/wizard at bay.  She does this by sitting back oblivious as all of the residents are turned into green slime all around her.  Nobody ever said she was a good witch.

By this point, it should be apparent that I'm getting ready to wrap up the plot description, so here goes.  All the while, Hathaway has been hanging around watching his little sister do strange things and spent forty-five minutes saying things like "she looks like my sister, but she isn't!"  He's made friends with Lockhart and asked to be trained in the ways of good witchery.  With all of the other characters transformed into mystical creatures (via some admittedly good-for-the-time practical effects courtesy of Buechler), it's time for the big showdown.  And...it's kind of a letdown.  No spoilers, but I don't think it makes a whole lotta sense.  Maybe it's just me.

This movie isn't scary at all, but it really isn't supposed to be.  There are some horror ELEMENTS to it, considering that a good portion of the middle of the movie consists of Wendy (that's possessed little girl for those keeping score) showing up to people's apartments, turning into the Troll, and stalking and transforming them.  But it's more a wizard/sorcery kind of story.  At that, it's alright, but this movie's little moments will make sure you never forget it. 

Empire and Full Moon movies are like that.  They might not be technically GOOD, and I've spent more than a few of them desperately trying to think of something else to do.  But after the credits have rolled, I find myself thinking about them and often laughing.  For an indication of what we're dealing with, there's a five-minute reverie in the middle of this thing where all of the newly-turned troll creatures have an impromptu music video, and it's just as amazing as it sounds.  Couple that with Fondacaro doing his thing, lots of animation and stop-motion style special effects, the dad of the main family randomly dancing and singing karaoke to himself for something like seven years (yes, really - that's the last one, I promise) and a whole bunch of other stuff and I kind of want to watch this again.  In twenty years.

Rating time.  This flick gets ** 1/2 out of ****.  Not a masterpiece by any stretch, but it's definitely worth a watch at some point if you've got 80 minutes to spare.  Check it out.

Ghoulies I and II (1984 and 1988)

1984 and 1988
Directed by Luca Bercovici and Albert Band
Starring Peter Liapis, Lisa Pelican, Michael Des Barres, Royal Dano, Phil Fondacaro and J. Downing

It has begun.  The annual, all-too-early anticipation of the Halloween season.  And this year it's starting a little earlier, for reasons that I'll get to in a little bit.  I've already taken on a whole bunch of different themes for this unholy time of year, from slasher flicks to last year's marathon of Universal monster movies.  Neither I nor my parents live on the greatest street in the history of Halloween anymore, which means that particular part of my childhood has died.  I was saddened greatly by this, almost to the point of not quite knowing what I was going to cover this year.  But fear not, good citizens, because I got my hands on this beauty over the course of the summer...

Oh yeah, the Empire Pictures Blu-Ray set, straight from the fine folks at Full Moon Direct.  At $250, it definitely wasn't cheap, but having seen a good two-thirds of the movies featured within before, it really is like watching them for the first time again considering the difference in the old beat-up VHS rental copies that I was used to versus whatever the hell the technical specs are on a Blu-Ray.  Eye opening.  And I now somewhat regret my years of ranting about having to buy an HDTV and how it wasn't "pure," or something.  I've always said things that don't really make sense.  This is no new phenomenon.

First, a little bit of background.  I've always been a huge fan of Full Moon Features, the almost exclusively direct-to-video juggernaut started by Charles Band in the late '80s and maintaining a glory period that lasted well into the '90s with the awesome Puppet Master franchise remaining front and center throughout this time and many other classics too numerous to mention.  Before there was Full Moon, however, there was Empire Pictures, the studio started by Charles and his father Albert.  I was a late-comer when it came to Empire, but holy hell, was I missing out.  I think you can sum these films up best with the following sentence: mean subjects but never mean-spirited.  That's the short end of the stick when it comes to the films contained in this box set...but it should also be noted that the set ITSELF is incredibly well put-together.  Almost every disc on it is stocked with extras, the box art is nifty, the enclosed booklet is interesting, it's all like an orgasm in convenient $250 form.  Whoa.  There's the most weirdly disturbing thing I'll say all year.  Having said all of that, as you can see above I manage to obtain set 262 out of 600, and I can only assume that they've sold quite a bit more of these in the months since.  If you are able to snatch one up, do it, and soon. 

Having said all of that, let's get to a couple of the movies contained in this bad boy!

Charles Band and the rest of the crew had done some movies under the Empire label before, but 1984's Ghoulies was definitely the one that made people stand up and take notice.  Well, sort of.  It's weird.  I remember seeing this VHS tape prominently on display in pretty much EVERY video store I visited as a kid, yet no one I knew seemed to have seen the movie.  A few years earlier and it would have been a different story, because this movie was a MASSIVE success as a rental.  The sequel Ghoulies II came four years later, pretty much after every other film that is going to get reviewed in this marathon, only this time it went theatrical.  I've already reviewed both of these movies.  Look to the April and May 2012 sections of this here blog if you want those reviews along with the later films in the Ghoulies series if you want those and if you're really masochistic, because that was when I wrote MAMMOTH reviews.  Think they're long and masturbatory now?  I used to detail every single last NUANCE of the flick in question.  Thus, I'll spare everyone the pain and make these reviews extra brief.  I promise.

The first movie is really a strange beast, as it has almost nothing to do with the title creatures in a move that most people claim is a shameless to cash in on the success of Gremlins.  Only Band came up with the "Beasties" concept before that film was even a thing, so chalk one up for ol' Charlie.  Peter Liapis is the star, and he plays Jonathan Graves, college kid who has just inherited a pretty damn sweet castle from his extended family.  He brings his girlfriend (Lisa Pelican) along with him, and they are also joined by Jonathan's college buddies - one of whom looks a hell of a lot like Kiefer Sutherland.  And when he starts break-dancing, it's hilarious.  Also worth mentioning is the caretaker of the house who shows up at the end to give us the most hilarious belly-laugh in cinema history.  Spoiler alert.

The flick is actually a lot more of a "sorcery" movie than a horror film for the most part, with Jonathan finding out that his father dabbled in the black arts and then doing a lot of dabbling himself.  The film might sound dumb, and in many ways it is, but it's also a lot of fun.  Liapis turns in a great performance, but the movie REALLY belongs to Michael Des Barres as Jonathan's zombified dad who shows up at the end for a demonic magic battle the likes of which you've never seen before.  Watching the extras on this Blu-Ray, I was stunned to find out that the dude is actually a rock singer in real life.  Makes sense considering some of the lines he screams out here.  I give this flick *** 1/2 out of **** for all of the wrong reasons, but it's definitely worth watching.  One of my favorite movies to pop in around October.

Which brings me to the second film.  Folks, THIS is your big Gremlins ripoff, as the ghoulies who pretty much only showed up to appear out of the shadows in the first film get front-and-center treatment this time around.  Through convoluted means that I won't bother recapping, they find their way to a carnival and wreak all sorts of havoc.  By and large, the protagonist aren't very interesting with one very notable exception: the always awesome Phil Fondacaro as Sir Nigel Penneyweight, a worker at the carnival's spook house who constantly talks about his amazing acting skills.  The movie also gives us a Mrs. Deagle-esque human villain in the form of a big company representative who is looking to shut down the carnival, thus putting everyone out of work.  Boo-hiss.

I don't enjoy the second movie quite as much, mostly because it is basically what I've already typed out.  You've seen this movie a bunch of times before.  However, it DOES manage to have the saving grace of the ghoulies themselves.  There's a bat-like ghoulie, a ghoulie with cloven hooves, a ghoulie that throws up toxic sludge, and the famous green "toilet" ghoulie that scare the bejeebers out of me as a kid when I saw it on the VHS cover.  We actually get the "ghoulie in a toilet" sequence in this movie, but all those years later I found it pretty underwhelming.  The movie isn't scary at all, and it isn't very much fun until the final trimester, but it is pretty damn offbeat.  That should be enough for a ** 1/2 out of **** rating...along with the awesome W.A.S.P. ending credits song "Scream Until You Like It."

Chronologically, the two Ghoulies movies bookend all of the other movies you're about to read about.  But they're a perfect starting point for those just getting into the goodness of Empire horror.  Over the coming weeks, we'll be diving into the abyss...and coming back alive.  Prepare yourself.

Alien: Covenant (2017)

2017
Directed by Ridley Scott
Starring Michael Fassbender, Katherine Waterston, Billy Crudup, Danny McBride and Demian Bichir

I've mentioned before - probably too many times - that I live 40 miles away from the nearest movie theater that doesn't resemble a room that's been flooded Poseidon Adventure style.  It really is amazing when you stop and think about it.  I don't live in a major metropolis by any means, but it IS a town of something like 12,000 people.  But enough about that boring story that I've told on repeat.  The bottom line that you need to know is that I have to be pretty interested in something to make that boring-ass drive through the cornfields of Iowa, and Alien: Covenant fit that bill.  A new Alien movie, the first TRUE-BLUE one in two decades, AND it has Ridley Scott coming back?  Count me in.

What I didn't fully realize going in was that it would be SO connected to Scott's previous film, Prometheus.  Now, I saw that film.  I remember kinda-sorta liking it, but there was nothing about it that ever made me want to see it again.  Kind of like 99.9% of films that hit cinemas these days.  That movie was set in the Alien film universe, but it didn't concern the xenomorphs at all, instead hitching it story to that of the Engineers.  Remember that one weird-looking thing inside the ship in the very first 1979 movie?  Well, that movie (and Pepperidge Farm) remembered.  The coolest part of that movie was undoubtedly David, the android created by a scientist whose mission was to find out what created humanity.  Michael Fassbender was awesome as David, and he returns here as your star characters in a dual role that we'll get to in due time.  In that regard, the movie has a lot going for it from the jump.  Unfortunately, though, this flick has its fair share of problems.  Some are story, some are execution, and while this flick is probably the third best movie in the Alien franchise, it's by such a large margin that it actually does make me very wistful for the state of movies in general.  I suppose that's enough pre-bitching.  On with the show.

11 years after the events of Prometheus, the starship Covenant is traveling through the vastness with everyone onboard in stasis.  Within short order, it's pulled out due to something technical on the ship that I can't be bothered to look up on Wikipedia blowing up, prompting the ship's overlord Walter - a newer-model android who identically resembles David - to wake the rest of the crew.  This is one of the movie's biggest problems, and it hits us right away.  The original Alien gave us a LONG slow-burn as we got to know each and every space trucker.  It wasn't until roughly 45 minutes in that the shit started to hit the fan.  In this one, they're in mortal danger right away, so where's the suspense?

As to be expected in a movie with this plot, it throws a LOT of characters at us.  Janet Daniels is your main one, given a sympathetic background due to the fact that her husband - the Captain of the ship - was just roasted alive.  She's played by Katherine Waterston, but seriously, she bears such a strong resemblance to another famous actress that from this point on in the life of the Lick Ness Monster she will be known as Budget Jennifer Lawrence.  It's uncanny, I tell ya.  There's also the usual batch of medical technicians, soldiers and pilots, the most memorable of whom being Billy Crudup as the new acting Captain of the ship whose personal faith is kind of a play on the theme of creation.  But you don't read my reviews for analysis like that.  There's also Danny McBride playing way against type as the chief pilot of the ship, but the real star of the show is Fassbender.  Even though he's done nothing other than attend to the human's whims, we know that he's here to be the chief character.  Time for the ship to search out that strange planet in the distance for help and not wait until the hurricane-like storm that's raging overhead passes, which is always a fantastic idea in a movie like this.

If you can't tell, this is a movie with a lot of logic holes.  See, the people of the Covenant (who, by the way, are protecting some 100,000 human embryos) are desperate for help and will do anything to get it, including raiding an unexplored planet without the aid of helmets or conducting some sort of scan first.  Because if there's one thing Star Trek taught me, it's that those life forms, life forms, precious little life forms are scannable.  Well, onto the planet they go, where they find absolutely no animal life forms, although the plant life is strangely human-cultivated.  This is followed by one of the crew members picking up a parasitic bug via his nose (and thanks to the helmet that he should have been wearing) that wastes little time murdering the f**k out of him.  And it's glorious.

And this is where the true purpose of the movie kicks in.  See, this planet is where David now lives.  Caution alert, 'cus here be spoilers.  It seems that after the events of Prometheus, he went as mad as an Android can go, releasing the strange pathogen on the waiting Engineers and causing their extinction.  He also began conducting experiments of his own, creating the familiar eggs and face huggers that we've been dying to see.  There is also the expected scenes exploring the differences between the early-and-late model cyborgs as Walter - designed to make less decisions and effectively be more "human" - has difficulty relating to his quasi-brother David.  Again, Fassbender is to be be commended for just how committed he was to this role, and these scenes are without a doubt the best thing in this movie.  What else do you need to know?  Oh yeah, David eventually leads one of the crew members to a waiting face hugger, where it attacks him and the remaining hour of the film is the game of Alien-Human cat-and-mouse we all know and love.

First, the good.  For what it's worth, the performances are all pretty good.  Fassbender, McBride and Crudup are all way cool characters, and I can't help but think that had we gotten a plot setup mechanism that was different than an explosion and more time to get to know these guys the movie would have been much better for it.  The set design on board the planet was also pretty cool, and there was this great scene right after the colonists reach the surface where there is just nothing.  Like, literally nothing, eerie silence.  The audience that I was with actually picked up on it at the same time the characters did, and it's always something when something written in a script like that is actually executed that well.  And all of the stuff between the dual androids played by Fassbender is must-watch material.

Unfortunately, there's a lot that didn't work here.  In addition to the aforementioned plot holes...man, this script just created massive bombs as far as series continuity goes.  So, David created the xenomorphs.  Right.  So...what about the massive Alien Queen that laid all of the eggs in Aliens?  And the big game between the Predators and the Aliens that had been going on since ancient times?  Does this mean that the AvP movies are non-canon now?  I can't say that this is necessarily a BAD thing, but I'm never a fan of a movie franchise that effectively tells us that a bunch of stuff that we've already watched effectively didn't happen.  I call this the Wasting My Time Principle, and I have every intention of patenting that, bitches.  And then there's Budget Jennifer Lawrence.  As the movie goes on, we unfortunately spend a LOT of time with her, hearing about the cottage that she and her deceased husband were supposed to build while sad syrupy music plays on the soundtrack.  Maybe I'm just an ass, but I couldn't have possibly cared less about any of this stuff.

And that, my friends, really is the difference between modern movies and the great stuff of yesteryear, according to this reporter.  Thus, Alien: Covenant gets a ** out of ****. 

And now for some thoughts on the Alien and Predator franchises as a whole.  Back in the day, we used to spend time with characters first building up tension and emotional investment.  I don't know where producers got the idea that audiences no longer want this, because nothing could be further from the truth.  We DO want more from movies than just explosions.  We CAN think, you morons!  This was so apparent in the first movies in both of these series, movies that were on-paper popcorn flicks but managed to become so much more than that by just doing a good, simple three-act structure. 

Over time, I definitely think the Predator films stayed MUCH more consistent, although that is a bit easier when you only have three true movies in the series since the AvP films kind of occupy a bizarre otherworld fantasy at this point.  Still, all three of them were about a small group of people that we slowly got to know facing off with an unstoppable wrecking ball in the Predator.  The Alien flicks, on the other hand, just went way off the beaten path at every turn by trying something radically different each time, getting further and further away from what made it special in the first place and eventually winding up with the movie that I just reviewed - a solid-enough 2017 action flick but one that was pretty much cookie-cutter in every way a film can be and retcons a lot of what happened previously.  So the message is this: keep it simple, stupid, and you can never go wrong.  Both of these franchises did just that with the awesome creatures that both got their titles from at one point, and both have definitely made their mark on science fiction and horror history.  Here's to hopefully getting some great stuff out of them in the future, because I'm always game for giving both franchises another shot. 

I'm done with this Megareview?  I'm finally done?

Predators (2010)

2010
Directd by Nimrod Antal
Starring Adrien Brody, Topher Grace, Alice Braga, Walton Goggins, Laurence Fishburne and Danny Trejo

Now we're talking.  We're away from Joss Whedon, away from Paul W.S. Anderson and away from whatever the f**k that last movie that I reviewed was, and right back into my wheelhouse - more pure Predator action.  Released in 2010 and with the backing of Robert Rodriguez' production company, Predators was exactly what we needed from this whole subsection of the horror/sci-fi genre.  At the time, anyway.

I remember absolutely loving this flick when I saw it in theaters back then.  It had been such a long time since I'd seen a good Predator movie, and this one had everything going for it.  It also had a director with the single greatest name I've ever seen - Nimrod.  I'm sure that it's not pronounced how it's spelled, but man, that is awesome.  So, I watched this movie, adored it...and then never watched it again until just a few days ago for the extensive amount of homework that goes into these reviews for YOU PEOPLE (pro wrestling heel mode).  What that means, good folks, is that I didn't like this movie quite as much as I thought if I could go three-quarters of a decade without watching it a second time.  It's got some flaws, yes, but overall it's still a fun little movie that once again managed to make a pretty nice profit off of a modest-by-2010-standards budget.  Introductory paragraph designed to make me sound like some sort of actual reviewer completed.  On with the plot.

There's a pretty big cast of characters in Predators, and the thing that I remembered really well about the movie from that initial viewing was that we needed to get to the action.  Thus, everyone essentially gets introduced in just a scene or two, but amazingly the script manages to pull it off pretty well.  Our main character is Royce, and I swear to you that Adrien Brody actually managed to pull off a badass role.  They say that acting ability > looks the part, and this performance is the f**kin' truth.  Our other star is Alice Braga as Isabelle, a sniper from the Israeli Defense Forces who has the added emotional layer of believing that a big mistake she made in the field is resulting in her punishment in the movie.  There's also Danny Trejo playing Danny Trejo (read: a beast), Topher Grace as a seemingly innocent medic, Oleg Taktarov as a Spetsnaz agent, and, amazingly, several others.  So how are all these characters together?

Well, as the flick opens, all of them have just been parachuted down into a jungle that none of them recognize.  All of them are armed, all of them are dangerous, and all of them have no earthly idea how they got into this predicament.  Good ol' director Nimrod does a great job setting up the atmosphere in the early goings here, but the movie spends little time giving us hidden character depth or dwelling on the cinematography before someone gets killed.  From there, we get a great sequence as said person who just GOT killed appears later on calling for help in a scene that goes on JUST long enough to clue us in that not all is as it seems with the situation.  This is what I came for with a brand-new Predator movie, as the familiar score, setting, creature and gut-wrenching sense of tension were well on display from the word-go.

I figured out pretty quickly what the gist of this whole plot was, so I don't think it's spoilerish to spell it out for 'ya (/Enzo Amore).  The jungle that all of these characters are on is, of course, another planet, and all of them were abducted from their lives in order to serve as new prey for this particular round of Predator-a-Go-Go.  There's four of them this time (although only three of them are actually out hunting for reasons that I won't get into in this review), with Derek Mears, Carey Jones and Brian Steele being the guys behind the alien suits.  There's also a curious subplot involving Laurence Fishburne's character Noland, a survivor of a previous edition of Predator Running Man.  I remember not finding Noland particularly captivating then, and time has not done this aspect of the movie any favors.  Not because of Fishburne; the dude was appropriately warped and crazy considering who Noland is, but it gives us this forced plot twist that anyone can see coming a mile away.  I think the script could have done without it and just stuck with the cat-and-mouse game.

Fortunately, that's an aspect of the movie that works really well.  In a decision that was nothing short of glorious, Predators was rated R, and the movie doesn't wuss out with its violent quota.  A lot of the stuff people dug about the original movie were here, with those slasher-movie-esque "slow pursuit" scenes being perfectly effective.  We get ANOTHER plot twist involving one of the hunted characters that actually managed to shock me the first time I saw this movie and that, weirdly enough, I completely forgot about until re-watching it.  We've actually gotten a few scenes of character development with Brody and Braga that manage to get a genuine emotional investment, so that when the ending comes with Brody showing up covered in mud holding a machete it manages to not be laughable.  I mean...Adrien Brody covered in mud holding a machete.  I just typed that sentence, and I just saw it in a film, and it actually WORKED.  Think about that for a second.

According to the ever-accurate Wikipedia, Topher Grace was reluctant to appear in this movie because he felt that none of the Predator sequels had done the original justice but reading this script changed his mind.  I concur with his assessment, but I will also levy that not EVERYTHING in this movie is good.  While the movie works extraordinarily well with the bread-and-butter stuff, it's also a pretty good case of "more is not always better."  The movie seemed like it was about 15 minutes longer than it should have been, mainly because of two subplots that could have been scrapped - the aforementioned story of Noland and the sad tale of the bullied Predator being held captive by the three skilled hunters that Brody and crew try to cut loose from its makeshift prison.  Longtime readers know that I'm all about "less is more," and I'm nothing if not consistent.  Probably to the point of being mind-numbingly boring.

Fortunately, what this movie does well, it does really well.  Brody, Braga, Trejo and Grace were all simply aces in their roles.  The concept of the movie could not have been better, giving us the logical next step in terms of how this society of hunters carries out their designated purpose in life.  Good sequels find ways to tell us a similar story in a different way, and much like James Cameron did with Aliens, that's what we get here.

Rating time.  Predators gets a good solid *** out of ****.  Yes, that's the same rating as Predator 2, and while I acknowledge that this movie is technically way better, this one doesn't have Bill Paxton acting like a douche.  Nobody said these reviews followed the scientific method.  At any rate, check this one out...and I can't wait for the upcoming prequel!

Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem (2007)

2007
Directed by The Brothers Strause
Starring Steven Pasquale, Reiko Aylesworth, John Ortiz, Johnny Lewis, Ariel Gade and Kristen Hager

If there is ever a film that would make one appreciate the glory that is Paul W.S. Anderson, you're looking at it.  Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem, henceforth known in this review as AVPR, has already reached legendary status as one of the worst movies of the 21st century in the great Sight and Sound poll that exists only in my own mind.  I also have no personal history to cull from when it comes to this flick, because I watched it only in preparation for this review.  The experience gave me some severe flashbacks to the Leprechaun reviews that made my blog hit the pause button for almost a full calendar year.

The brain trust at 20th Century Fox turned away from Paul "Holy Shit" Anderson this time around, turning to a couple of brothers who had been running a visual effects company for something like a decade when they were given this assignment.  Colin and Greg Strause have said in interviews that the instructions were simple - more violence and more creature effects, since those were the primary fan criticisms of the first movie.  They succeeded on that account, but boy, did they ever do it in a smash-you-over-the-head way.  The back-of-the-DVD "More guts! More gore!" promise is the proof of that.  The movie was swept into theaters on Christmas day of 2007, which ranks it right up there with Gangs of New York in terms of all-time least appropriate yuletide films.  It was a complete failure with critics, but as crappy as it was, it still pulled in the dough.  $130 million on a $40 million production budget is hard to argue with.  Damn that worldwide theatrical audience.  With that, let's get on the truly epic story that you're about to see unfold.

I will give the flick this; it spends a decent amount of time building up its creature story.  The main Predator from the last film is being Jetsoned back into space on a ship, only for a chestburster to emerge from its...chest.  Truly Shakespearian writing right there.  This is an area where one of the conventions of the Alien series actually comes out pretty cool, as we get a pretty nifty looking creature that the ever-accurate Wikipedia refers to as the "Predalien."  And it's pretty badass.  The xenomorphs take over the ship, which promptly crash lands in the small town of Gunnison, Colorado.  That is our setup, ladies and gentlemen.  The intro sequences also sound awesome on paper, with one big problem that I'll be getting to later on.

It's time for one of the up-and-coming midcarders in the Lick Ness Monster cliche book.  Sport fans...it's time to meet the characters of AVPR.  Boy, what a bunch this is.  Your two main stars are Steven Pasquale and Reiko Aylesworth, and I was very familiar with the latter having been a big fan of 24.  Pencil her into my unofficial "why didn't this person get a bigger shot?" rolodex, because she's both talented and hot enough to get the shot that, say, Carey Mulligan did.  She plays Kelly O'Brien, just coming back to Gunnison after a long stint in the military to reconnect with her husband and young daughter.  Pasquale is ex-con Dallas Howard who has a semi-redemptive story arc to him that unfortunately isn't played out, like, at all.  On paper, these two are sympathetic and endearing, and it's a shame that the movie never slows down to develop them beyond that paper-thin establishment.  The rest of the characters are your average 21st century horror movie vaguely hatable chucklefucks, complete with the totally original plot of some emo dweeb pining for a hot girl who has a douchebag boyfriend.  Now, I don't mind this plot in, say, an actual teen comedy film.  But in action or horror films, I DESPISE this story arc.  It doesn't make the character any more heroic, it just makes them a whiny little bitch. 

What ensues?  Surely you don't need me to spell it out, but I will anyway.  What you might NOT expect is this extended action sequence that takes place in the sewers underneath the town, with the lone-wolf Predator taking on a bunch of aliens.  Yeah.  Sewers.  Remember how I said I had something to get to earlier?  Well, here it goes: the DARKNESS.  Almost all of the action sequences in this film are shot in pitch-black, with only things like flickering light bulbs and the flash from weapon fire lighting the scene.  I didn't think it was possible to come up with something worse than the Michael Bay shakicam, but this is pushing it.  It's a recurring theme that haunts the rest of the movie, as the aliens begin taking over the town and killing off all of the secondary characters.  Time for another Lick Ness cliche: that previous sentence was something like 30 minutes of this movie.  Over this series of reviews, it really has become apparent to me that the Alien movies and the things connected to them really were slasher flicks who wore hardened exoskeletons instead of masks, and that description certainly applies to this movie as well.

Amazingly, the movie's finale culls from not just one but two classic zombie movies for inspiration/ripoff material.  By this point, the small group of remaining characters (if you want to keep score, it's Dallas, Kelly, her daughter, and emo dweeb guy) make their way to the town hospital in order to escape by helicopter.  George Romero, your lawsuit is ready.  It should surprise nobody reading this that they actually make it away, but during the course of this escape, the military launches a tactical nuke at the town.  Maybe this was an homage of sorts to Dan O'Bannon, the creator of the xenomorphs in the first place who later directed the movie that used this trope (Return of the Living Dead)?  Or maybe i'm overthinking it.

That should about fulfull my four-paragraph "story description" template.  This is some bad movie, but it's bad in a way that's hard to explain if you're not watching it.  It had the right idea to set its action someplace where audiences would be able to connect to it instead of, say, the goddamn continent of Antarctica.  I think a bigger city would have worked better, but maybe the budget wouldn't allow it.  Unfortunately, that world gets populated by a bunch of annoying kids that we beg the warring alien species to make their collective bitches.  I actually think the script would have been better had it just focused on the Dallas and O'Brien characters.  With more time to warm up to them, I think both Pasquale and Aylesworth would have had the acting chops to get us on their side.  But that's just me trying to snipe in with my pesky constructive thoughts.

This is one of those rare movies where the execution is where it fails, and I put the checkmark right next to the Brothers Strause on that one.  On the advice of a friend, I actually watched this movie with director commentary shortly after watching it, and it's very telling.  These guys are special effects whores through and through, and this is very apparent as they pretty much do nothing but talk up visuals all throughout the track.  I highly recommend that anyone reading this review give it a listen, because it's a pretty good lesson in "substance is more important than style."  And it does lead to one extremely hilarious moment during one of the fight scenes as they talk up the "amazing creature effects" in this particular scene...that we can't even see, because said scene looks like it was lit with an itty bitty book light.

I was ready to give this flick a mere 1/2 * out of ****, but I'll bump it up to an even * just because I actually liked what little we got of Pasquale and Aylesworth in this movie.  All of the other characters, and even the action, are something like that 1991 Clash of the Champions Van Hammer match that you skipped over as a kid.

Alien vs. Predator (2004)

2004
Directed by Paul W.S. Anderson
Starring Sanaa Lathan, Lance Henriksen, Raoul Bova, Ewen Bremner and Colin Salmon

And so it has come to this.  Let's flash back to 2004, back when I was 21 years old and had just moved away for my last couple years of college.  So young, so vibrant, so full of life...and the first movie I saw in my college town was Alien vs. Predator, a.k.a. AvP.  Words cannot express just how much I was anticipating this flick.  Hell, it was the only Atari Jaguar game I ever bothered to play.  Lo and behold, I get unpacked, spend a few days finding a job, walk around the campus for a little while, and then take this movie in as my reward at the end of a long first week in central Minnesota.  And I hated it.

Yeah, at the time I thought this movie was a big steaming pile.  Loud, overbearing and completely devoid of anything resembling the awesomeness of the story I had envisioned in my head, it didn't take long for me to swear this thing off and vow never to watch it again.  Well, upon re-watching it again for this review, I can report that the movie is still pretty bad.  However, it's that rare kind of bad that's actually kinda fun to watch at times.  Call it the Paul W.S. Anderson charm.  Yeah, his movies tend to be pretty unwatchable on the whole, but you can't say that the guy doesn't at least have a zeal and fighting spirit for his stuff.  This one included.  That kind of moxie is definitely needed when your acting brigade consists of Lance Henriksen and a bunch of no-names, but we'll get to them in due time.  The movie was meant to be the springboard for a new side franchise that both the Alien and Predator series could vault from, but alas, all we got was one more film from that concept before it was sayonara, suckas.  Again, more on that in due time (like, next week).  With all of that said, let's go about exploring the epic scope of the film I saw on some dingy mall theater screen right around the time I was sweating Business Statistics 301.

Amazingly, the movie takes place in the present day.  Or, at least, the present day of 2004 that makes me feel older every type I type that year.  You know EvilCo, that long-running corporation that has been the human no-gooders for the entirety of the Alien series?  Well, this is the ORIGIN STORY, baby.  Meet Charles Bishop Weyland, head guy of Weyland Industries, placed by Lance Henriksen in all of his slimy no-gooding glory.  It seems as if the company has detected a massive heat signature way below the Antarctic ice, and Weyland wants to claim the pyramid that the satellite finds at this site all to himself because reasons.  I'll admit that I wasn't paying a whole lot of attention when I first popped in this DVD, so bare with me.  Again, what I love about movies like this is that they almost always assemble a team of experts who universally hate each other, and this one is no exception.  Of them, the only one who doesn't immediately stand out as future intergalactic creature fodder is Alexa Woods (Sanaa Lathan), the overall guide of the whole mission who is actually pretty likable in addition to being pretty damn hot.  And this is where I will cut off the Skeevy Paragraph before it starts.

From here, a whole bunch of convoluted stuff happens that get us on the way to what we came for.  See, a Predator ship is lurking in space waiting for something.  If this were an episode of Star Trek, this would be the part where Captain Kirk hit the "f**k it, shoot 'em down" button, but alas we don't have William Shatner in sight here.  The pyramid contains all kinds of clues that shock no one who has seen even one of the previous films, gradually cluing us in that this is some sort of ancient civilization where humans co-existed with both alien species and that the xenomorphs are there to serve as the ultimate prey for the Predators.  They even have their own queen ready to go at the site to start pumping out those almighty facehuggers just for this purpose.  See those last two sentences?  It's rapidly becoming one of my favorite review cliches, but it's something like 30 minutes of this movie condensed.  What you need to know is that the Predators soon arrive and kill off all of the secondary characters, which is then immediately followed by two of them (dubbed Celtic Predator and Ensign Ricky Predator by yours truly) immediately get dusted off by one of the freshly-hatched xenomorphs.  Derp.

If you can't tell, the story of this movie is all over the place, but no theater audience was there in 2004 to see the epic scope of the story that this film had to offer.  We wanted the showdown, and fortunately that's what we get from here on out.  It should go without saying that the only human survivor is Alexa, and now she's caught in the crossfire of the Predators and their deadly prey (but not one that demands that you take off your shirt or else he'll cut you out from under it - and if you get that reference, you get 10 Fonzie cool points).  Much like that other horror-ish smackdown that took place a year earlier called Freddy vs. Jason, the movie makes a kinda-sorta decision about which one we should pull for based on the human characters tying their fate to one of them, and that's the plot device here. 

It's kind of an unsung role, but Sanaa Lathan really was good here; when it's down to herself, the scarred Predator, and a whole army of xenomorphs led by their gigantic queen, we're actually on her side.  Especially during that nifty scene when the lone Predator gives her a shield made from one of the xenomorph craniums and christens her by burning her cheek with alien blood.  That was pretty cool, even in 2004 when I was actively loathing this film.  Sometimes, the story can get downright dopey.  How so?  I just realized that I completely left the OTHER surviving human character for much of the running time out of this review, and he's so inconsequential to the plot that I don't even feel guilty.  Every time this dude is a part of the action the movie feels less, and when he gets captured...yikes.

As a film with a long development time of something like a decade, they definitely had plenty of advance notice to work out an awesome story for a movie where the two most vicious cineamtic aliens of all time got to go toe-to-toe.  This was not that film.  When I saw the movie in theaters, I thought that the story was terrible.  I don't think that anymore, but Paul W.S. Anderson just has a way of making his movies feel very soulless.  He was quoted once as saying that he watched Citizen Kane and was bored to tears by all of the talking, and that no one has ever felt that way while watching one of his movies.  His career is a really strange beast, in that I absolutely love his one and only original property (the downright horrific 1997 sci-fi horror classic Event Horizon) and can pretty much tell everything else to screw.  There's no soul or depth to anything that goes on here, and that shouldn't surprise anyone who has seen his version of Resident Evil or any one of its 17,000 sequels.

However, upon watching the movie again, something strange happened.  Call it the nostalgic rose-colored glasses for a time when I was slightly younger, but this time around I thought the final trimester was fairly cool.  That last word is a big key - cool, because the movie is still definitely lacking all of the hallmarks of the best of these series.  Namely, any semblance of tension, shocks and even gore, which this flick was such a letdown with that it became the centerpiece of the sequel's marketing campaign. 

< sigh >  I suppose it's time to assign a rating to the movie described in this incredibly nonsensical review.  I'll give AvP ** out of ****.  All these years later, it's not the out-and-out disaster that I remembered it being.  It's still a big disappointment, but compared to what would follow, it's a Patrick Bateman undisputed masterpiece.

Alien: Resurrection (1997)

1997
Directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet
Starring Sigourney Weaver, Winona Ryder, Ron Perlman, Dan Hedaya, J.E. Freeman, Brad Dourif and Michael Wincott

Funny story about writing this review - that poster you see up above is burned into my brain.  I didn't even need to look it up to know what it was, and if I had even a single inkling of artistic (read: MS Paint) ability I could have made the damn thing myself.  See, I got that poster when I went to some long ago movie in the fall of 1997, and it stayed on the wall of my old room at the parents' house for something like 15 years after the fact.  Hell, the thing was STILL up on that wall right up until a few months ago when I helped them move.  Thus, that image has a ton of nostalgic value for yours truly.  Unfortunately, that's where my wistfulness regarding Alien: Resurrection ends, because I think this movie is just a giant miscue on pretty much every level.

It certainly wasn't a misfire when it came to keeping the series alive.  We've had the two AvP flicks and two more Ridley Scott-directed films since, and it made a very respectable $160 million at the worldwide box office.  It promised yet more mayhem with the same main star who had been omnipresent in the series since the beginning, as well as the BIG COMEBACK (capitalized because important) role for Winona Ryder.  More on that later.  It had a script by Joss Whedon, a man who makes me scratch my head at the fact that he's one of the two Kings of Hollywood of the moment along with J.J. Abrams.  I mean...how did that happen?  One guy created Buffy.  The other created Jennifer Garner.  And now...they're essentially royalty.  Whatever.  But you get the idea.  Everything was here on paper, and people came and saw on opening night.  And while some fans of the series consider this to be a fun little diversion before it turned to spoof for the big smackdown, I've never liked it.  No sir, I don't like it (/Mr. Horse).  On with the show.

The movie starts with yet another example of the Alien series' trademark EvilCo chicanery, as members of the military find the DNA materials of Ripley.  And what do they do with this knowledge?  Extract the queen inside of her and make a clone.  Because that sounds like a spectacular idea.  Actually, it's not the dumbest story idea that Whedon could have concocted, as the opening passages of the film actually make a decent amount of sense.  The movie has some fun pretty early on experimenting with this new version of Ripley (now dubbed Ripley 8), including watching her punch through walls and dunk basketballs.  After all, this Ripley is half human/half alien, with all of the strengths and none of the weaknesses.  Once again, Weaver is excellent in the role, and there is hope that this could be a pretty kickass movie.  But then...the other characters come into the fray.

Every time I watch this movie, this is the aspect of it that completely kills it for me.  It was no different this time.  See, the military no-goodniks in the film rely on a bunch of mercenaries to provide them with human hosts for their alien experiments.  Folks, EVERY single character in this film with the exception of Ripley 8 is nothing short of a totally hateful douchebag that desperately makes you ant to see them get killed.  It's definitely a far cry from the first film, where we had this cool group of space truckers that we were genuinely fairly invested in.  It's really a shame, because they're comprised of some cast, including Ron "Earl The" Perlman being his usual gruff self and an appearance from Brad "Horror Movie Gold" Dourif as one of the scientists involved in cloning Ripley.  What you need to know is that there's a bunch of dislikable asshats in the movie now, and the bad guys completely and utterly fail to keep the alien project under wraps.  Cue running and screaming aboard the ship where this whole thing takes place.

And now for a Lick Ness Monster Side Rant.  As previously mentioned, Winona Ryder is in this movie, getting top billing along with Weaver when this one came out.  In the online pro wrestling world, a frequent discussion point is how bookers take a wrestler that they're personally fond of and shove them down your throats whether you like it or not.  If anyone out there thinks that Hollywood doesn't do this...they're wrong.  I don't remember anyone clamoring to see Shia LaBeouf in 2007, but then all of a sudden we were constantly told that this dude was a big deal despite audiences by and large being apathetic to him (big-league franchises be damned).  I think this is also the case with Ms. Ryder, and I couldn't tell you why.  This flick was supposed to be her career launching point after doing nothing of note for a few years, and it didn't take.  Amazingly, she got ANOTHER chance at hitting the big leagues a few years later with Girl, Interrupted, and instead she got totally outshined by Angelina Jolie.  For whatever reason, directors were just OBSESSED with making her a star for almost a decade-and-a-half.  I don't hate her, but I don't get why they were so determined to make it happen.  Oh, and this trend?  Yeah, it continues.  Taylor Kitsch, I'm looking at you.

Anyway, back to Alien: Resurrection.  There's actually a cool concept that the xenomorphs use this time around in the idea that they exploit their genetic memory to their advantage, along with Ripley 8 having a psychic bond with the aliens.  It gets brought up whenever the story needs it, which unfortunately means we spend a LOT of time with the group of mercenaries.  Most of them get picked off, and we eventually get a twist involving Ryder's character that most people will see coming if you're a veteran to this series.  There's also a big finale involving the extracted queen alien and its really, really weird-looking humanoid offspring that some fans think is coolness personified.  Me?  I just preferred the classic brood queen from the second movie.  But I'm the most boring human being alive.

In looking through some of the external reviews, there's a quote from Roger Ebert that pretty much sums up this whole film to perfection: "There is not a single shot in the movie to fill one with wonder."  It really is something just how much suspense had fallen to the wayside, even by 1997.  Everything about the execution of the first film, from the slow burn reveals to the eerie, simple score to the threat that escalates as the movie goes on, had been replaced by loudness, gunshots and explosions.  And not the good kind of loudness, gunshots and explosions that James Cameron utilized, either.  The bad kind.  The annoying kind.  The kind that Michael Bay and Roland Emmerich had made famous at multiplexes in the middle part of the '90s and that had already begun to infect popcorn movies, is well on display here. 

Really, though, it just comes down to whether or not you care when it comes to movies like this.  Given what we had to work with - a character who had essentially been stripped of everything in Ripley (including most of her memories) being tailed by a group of essentially moral-free human cargo jockeys and their crazy hijinx trying to escape from a military mad science experiment - it's just very difficult to care about anything that goes on here.  Weaver has said in interviews since that she would not say no to playing Ripley again if the right project comes along, but if THIS is her swan song in the role, I do think it's kind of sad, because I don't have much good to say about it.

* out of ****.  It definitely reversed course from Alien and gave us a whole heaping helping of xenomorph action again.  Too bad they did it in the most obnoxious way possible.  Avoid this one.